On Sat, 3 Aug 2013, Andreea Bolos wrote:
 Thank you for your replies. It is very helpful for me. The data I am
 working with contains sensitive information and I do not have the
 permission to share it, otherwise I would have sent a sample.  The command
 worked but now I encountered another problem. The message is "data types
 not conformable for  operation". Gretl asked for the aggregation option.
 But I do not  want to aggregate.  The right-hand variables have more than
 one match with the left-hand variables. 
That sounds like a blocker: if there's more than one match on 
the right for a given row on the left, this _must_ be handled 
somehow, either by one "aggregation" method or other 
(including sequence number as an option), or by application of 
a filter on the right-hand data to reduce the matches to 
uniqueness. (Or possibly by sub-sampling on the left to skip 
rows that have multiple matches on the right.) You just can't 
stick more than one value from the right into a given 
row/column slot on the left.
 The files contain both numerical and string variables that 
 need to be matched (the count of matches is not helping). 
 For example one column on the right-hand that needs to be 
 matched to the left-hand through variable NUMBER (numerical 
 variable) looks similar to this:
 TYPEOFCONTROL (name)
 type2
 type2
 type2
 type3
 type4
 ...
 Is it possible through the JOIN function to get it in numerical form after
 matching, or they need to be numerical before matching? 
You can match first. Here's a trivial example:
content of bolos1.csv:
x,key
1,a
2,b
3,c
4,d
5,e
content of bolos2.csv:
TYPEOFCONTROL,key
type2,e
type2,d
type2,c
type3,b
type4,a
hansl script:
open bolos1.csv
join bolos2.csv TYPEOFCONTROL --ikey=key
print -o
output from script:
? open bolos1.csv --quiet
Read datafile 
/home/cottrell/stats/esl/gretl/build/cli/bolos1.csv
? join bolos2.csv TYPEOFCONTROL --ikey=key
? print --byobs
               x           key TYPEOFCONTROL
1             1             1             3
2             2             2             2
3             3             3             1
4             4             4             1
5             5             5             1
Allin Cottrell